Highway 7 is among danger areasLast week, we highlighted several dangerous intersections in the Russellville area. We should have included another dangerous area. A wreck on Highway 7 near its intersection with Linker Mountain Road resulted in two deaths Saturday. The fatal crash wasn't the first on that stretch of highway between Russellville and Dover. Every now and then, an accident will claim someone's life, and the victims follow no pattern - young and old, residents a...

Desperate measure is evidentThe $25 million bounty on Saddam Hussein's head is a desperate measure of an administration desperate for something to show for Gulf War II. Something other than a mounting toll of dead American troops, that is. The war began with an attack on a location that supposedly held Saddam and his sons and henchmen. In the days afterward, we were told that Saddam had been injured, perhaps seriously. At another point in the war, bombs again targeted a ...

Reason to celebrate todayNot everybody agrees with us. That's fine. We can still print our little editorials, and letter-writers can send in their rebuttals. We might not find 100 percent agreement on any subject, but no one -- not even Big Brother -- can muzzle us. That's the way this freedom of the press works. We don't have to go to the state-sanctioned church. We can go to whichever one we want. We don't have to go at all. We can be Baptists or Catholics or Method...

Dangerous roadways need lookStaff writers Mark Scott and Sean Ingram have been writing this week about the most dangerous intersections in and around Russellville. Their findings came as no surprise to those who keep up with accidents and traffic congestion. We were aware that Arkansas Avenue is a dangerous roadway because of its traffic volume, numerous points of entry and narrow lanes. We also knew that Highway 331 sees more than its fair share of crashes, and many of ...

Colleges on target with mergerThe folks in higher education get the big picture. News came Tuesday that Mississippi County Community College in Blytheville and Cotton Boll Technical Institute in Burdette have merged to form Arkansas Northeastern College. The institution will have a main campus in Blytheville and satellite campuses in Burdette, Leachville, Osceola and Paragould. What does that mean? Two things. First, and foremost, students in Northeast Arkansas will have a...

Majority knows truth about warAccording to a recent poll conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, American attitudes toward Gulf War II are changing, if slowly. One number in particular doesn't bode well for President George W. Bush. Six in 10 of those surveyed believe that the government lied about aspects of the war. Sixty percent, a majority, believe that the president and his administration fudged the truth about going t...

Study may highlight inequitiesLegislators will soon begin studying how the state Department of Higher Education doles out dollars to colleges and universities. They'll probably learn many things, and they'll have a lot to consider. We'd like to send them a copy of last Wednesday's edition of The Courier. The top of page one included a story and graphic that addresses one of the most important aspects of higher education funding in this state - inequity. Inequity is a commo...

Don't give up on a good thingThe quiet picnic on a Buffalo River gravel bar was interrupted by the green dragonflies roaring overhead. It was a time between the wars, not Gulf War I and II, but between Vietnam and Gulf War I. It was a time of cold war, before the Berlin Wall fell, when the big worry in western Europe was whether Soviet tanks would come surging through the Fulda Gap, igniting World War III. Those dragonflies were taking part in the preparations for that da...

Hard issues won't go awayAmong the many Murphy's laws are these: The important things are always simple. The simple things are always hard. The easy way is always mined. Why is it that city officials so often forget these small truths? They choose the easy way out. Such is the case with the issue of truck trailers used for advertising, which was tabled at the request of the planning staff at Monday night's Russellville Planning Commission meeting. Instead of facing th...

Censorship harmful, tooThe Arkansas Legislature has been maligned (and, for the most part, rightly so) for doing little during this year's General Assembly, but one little thing the legislature approved is something libraries and bookstores are having a big problem with. Tucked into an amendment to an existing unlawful-acts law was a provision requiring libraries and bookstores to cover and segregate material deemed inappropriate for young children. The American Civ...

Keep away, Little RockWe may not agree fully with the rural advocates who are strongly (and thus far successfully) opposing any form of school consolidation, but we will stand in solidarity with any who choose to oppose further encroachment by Little Rock. The federal government, in its infinite wisdom, recently decided to add rural Perry County to the greater Little Rock Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), which puts the outermost outskirts of Little Rock five mi...

Tax plan just might workWe've made few bones about our disagreements with President George W. Bush's recent tax-cut proposals and Congress' final action. We think that too many of the plan's facets help those who don't need the help and too few of them help those who do. The nation's white-collar workers and silver-spoon heirs made out pretty well, at the expense of blue-collar Americans. But one small part of the tax-cut plan • misleadingly termed a "stimulus" packa...

Civil secrecy is no serviceCity Attorney Trey Smith definitely needs to sit down with members of the Russellville Civil Service Commission - if he can ever find them together. "It's hard enough to get a quorum with five members," said Chairwoman Toni Bachman in explaining why the commission opposes a proposal now before the City Council to expand the membership to seven. But lack of a quorum is no obstacle to taking action on behalf of the commission, which is supposed ...

Late facility beats noneThere's just no satisfying some people, but we hope that won't be the case when it comes to the recent challenge to the proposed River Valley Intermodal Facility. The Intermodal Authority learned Monday that the project, once slated to begin by January, could be delayed two years if a full Environmental Impact Statement is required following a lawsuit filed by the city of Dardanelle, three wildlife groups and three individuals. At least one au...

A structure for the agesFor a structure so shiny and new, there is an odd sense of permanence about the new visitors center at Lake Dardanelle State Park. Approached from the roadway, the center already has the solidity and presence of structures like Mather Lodge on Petit Jean or even the grand old buildings at Yellowstone National Park. Seen from the Arkansas River, the complex's stone ramparts leave a feeling of a scaled-down Civil War coastal battery. One can alm...

Trailer sign rules neededPlanning issues are like campaign finance issues for politicians • they're gonna come up now and then, but nobody wants to talk about them. Because of that swept-under-the-rug fact, development projects and their ramifications have long been a thorn in Russellville's side. Elected and appointed officials through the years have, for the most part, supported development at nearly any cost, at the expense sometimes of orderly growth. They've rela...

From abstract to concreteWhat do children most need out of schools today? There are almost as many answers to that question as there are students. Parents aren't doing a good job of parenting? Teachers can give those kids the love and nurturing they need, all 100 of them per teacher each day. The kids live in poverty? The lunchroom ladies will serve them two squares a day at school. Little Johnnie can't stay out of trouble with the law? The assistant principal will ma...

It's not easy being a dadFather's Day. Among all the holidays, Father's Day is perhaps the only one with Dad as its focus. Thanksgiving, Christmas, even Labor Day give families excuses to visit Mom or call Mom or send Mom a card. Father's Day, though, is just for Dad. It's not easy being a dad. There's no rule book, and there aren't too many experts on the subject, other than other dads. For whatever reason, parenting isn't something that men talk amongst themselves a...

Three options for fiscal budgetRussellville City Council members, led by Alderman Cliff Kirchner, have begun looking for ways to turn the city's fiscal situation around. At this point, it's not in good shape. A few years ago, the city began building a new police station, softball park and soccer complex. Those facilities cost about $5 million. They're done now and have benefitted the city in many ways. The downside to these projects is that they drained the city's treasury....

Governor's tour kicks off todayGov. Mike Huckabee's first tour stop to stump for public education reform will be today in Springdale. He chose a fairly safe locale for the kickoff speech. Springdale School District is one of the state's shining examples of education as it should be. Its facilities are community college-esque. Its course offerings are staggering in number, subject content and scope. Its faculty are the cream of the crop (boasting a starting salary about 50 p...